Yahoo Groups ‘Neo’ Interface, can be improved

Yahoo had recently rolled out their new group interface ‘neo’, on 7th August 2013 for selected groups. It become live over my groups yesterday. Its definitely a great young and fresh interface as per its name ‘neo ‘, but their are few functionality drops and slow performance over the various modules. I will be sharing what need to be done, to improve and make the Admin, Moderators and users happy.

Features ‘Neo’ dropped:

These are the key features loved by group moderators and administrators, these features make their work easier, fast and smooth.

Html edit:

Editing a message and making it properly available to the Members is the key responsibility of Group admin and moderators.

When a message is send to a group, it can be clean or it can contain hundreds of email addresses of the users to it has been send before reaching the group. Moderators removes all such email addresses, cleans the message and sends it to Members.

Sometime a message is being sent with promotional purpose, but holds quality information. Moderators edit the promotional part and approves the message to the group.

Select box:

Select box should be their for custom bulk delete, approve or delete as spam option. I really miss delete as spam option. Individual deletion and approval process is consuming a lot of moderators, hence can be supported by a select box.

Edit Membership and Send Message:

These two are the life savers for moderators interaction to the members, and resolving their queries instantly. At times when a new member registers with a group, it make message delivery option as daily digest, but later wants to change it to individual or want to leave a group. Member being not aware of group available functionalists mails the group with his/her request. Moderators as per their request executes instantly or mails the member from their itself.

Features ‘Neo’ Introduced:

New features that Neo Introduced can be termed cool and attractive, but each features is accompanied with some problems.

Auto Scrolling:

Auto scrolling is one of the finest feature, but image you have 500+ messages and a slow internet connection. It could take a lot of time to see the latest messages, image a case when connection drops. So, for this the order of message appearance need to to changed; latest message should come first than the old messages, just like our email inbox.

Attachment indication should be provided, if their is a attachment in the message.

Message Pop Up Window:

I Loved this features, but loading time need to be improved. The attached images to the message are not showing in the message window, while the images hosted over other servers are visible in the message window. This provides a lot of difficulty in approving the message to the group. Since their are no visual indication towards attachments in the message.

Cover Page:

I don’t find any short coming with this feature, it eventually makes group page look more attractive.

Group Activity list:

A new group activity list is provided to the Left hand side of the group pages, which makes scrolling to other groups in the list easier.

Features ‘Neo’ Should Introduced:

As detailed in the dropped and introduced features, lets conclude with the following requirements:

Html Edit of Messages,

Attachment indication to be provided,

Attached images should appear in the message window,

Select box for custom deletion/approval,

Edit Membership and Send Message for perfect group moderation,

Auto scrolling order of messages, should begin with latest messages first.

Lets hope Yahoo! Groups look to bring these changes and improve this new interface.

19 thoughts on “Yahoo Groups ‘Neo’ Interface, can be improved”

Neo = Fail.
There are no redeeming features. Nothing works.
All the moderators and owners are dead-in-the-water.
There are too many bugs for even an excellent team of engineers to fix. And right now, it seems that YahooGroups doesn’t even have one engineer capable of writing good software.
Neo spells the death of YahooGroups.

Yahoo, you pricks! Some idiot’s forced this on us without any consultation or approval. Look at the stupid and patronising replies to the complaints on Yahoo’s own site. ‘They’re investigating it’ -no, they’re hoping you’ll give up and go away. Thanks to the ‘genius’ at Yahoo who rolled out this crap, I can’t access files on the sites I belong to, the menu is written and designed by a madman, and as usual I’m offered a load of redundant and irrelevant dross that I can watch anywhere else.
Yahoo -you need to fire several people in important places!

Now the new interface, has limited the role of moderators and admins to ordinary users with little privileges.
With the advancement of a interface, time delay is minimized, but with ‘neo’ this time has been increased, making the life of moderator hell.
Processes go dead, and who knows when they start working.
Definitely, its the end of yahoo groups. I being a moderator, would like to get the stated features back on the group pages.

As at time of writing, many groups have enough functionality to carry on.
However others are in really deep trouble because (for example):
- moderator functions they depend on have been compromised
- vital Database doesn’t work
- photo Archives are unusable
- ‘access’ tools for blind people have been wiped out.

The use of random live users to do the testing is both unethical and commercial suicide. But above all, it betrays our trust for the second time in recent years.
As a result there’s a huge amount of Owner energy going into checking-out alternatives to Yahoo! Groups.
I’ve checked out most of them and last week I would have said that Yahoo! was top of the heap of Free groups. Today – well, it doesn’t even have a working product, so where does that place it?

You are right on. The Neo interface is a nightmare for list owners. We all are out there looking for alternatives, including many of us with longtime groups who really don’t want to lose our message logs. But it is just not functioning on a basic level, has lost basics like the organization of Photo logs, and no ability to even set reply to list as a default.

I urge everyone to widely post the url to the Yahoo feedback group and at least people can Vote on posts , which is the easiest way to give these dolts feedback. I tried to initiate a new post and it took forever so I gave up. I’ve already devoted enough time to this fiasco.

Our group owners are actively looking for a new home. I’m not an owner or moderator, just a user.

The common answer at the Feedback page is that they’re working on it. Not a good answer. Springing a non-functioning program on people is, as you said, suicide.

I am a Yahoo Group owner. My groups, with this new ‘neo’, are dead. I cannot do anything with them. The new format is ugly, and unattractive! I have no access to make my group unique as I once did. This was a big thing in attracting members to the group. The majority of the functions I use as an owner, aren’t even being close to working, at the moment I am nothing more than a regular member in the groups I OWN! There is nothing good with this ‘neo’ interface. With the unpopularity in groups, there are a MASSIVE amount of people ready to close their groups, move them to another platform, and close out any Yahoo accounts that they have. I know I am one of those people!

Both my Yahoo groups, which have been NEO’d without warning, are pretty much dead in the water. Everything is a mess and so far Yahoo has done nothing to rectify the situation.

If they don’t revert back to the classic format – I will delete both my groups and unfortunately, given Yahoo’s previous track record of just springing these horrible test platforms on us – it’s doubtful that they care if they lose a few thousand people (from my groups alone).

Disastrous fail, but will Yahoo be able to see it before we all stampede to Google or some other host? They are going to lose major traffic over this.

It is a nightmare for moderators like me. I send invites to new members, and yahoo refuses them. They can’t get in, and i’m not allowed to add them manually anymore. Default is set to reply to individuals, not groups, with no way to change it. Newbies are going to be scratching their heads and giving up, because even longtime list owners are ready to bail.

There is nothing pretty about the Neo groups layout. Even though some things work, when I am at my group’s site, I can’t do anything with it. It looks like it was thrown together on the cheap. And, maybe it was.

Not only is it unworkable, NEO is unforgivably ugly. Classic gave us the option of decorating the pages with color and a photo of almost any size or shape. Few photos fit the banner format they have forced on us, and you cannot have anything but unrelieved, deadly-boring and hard-on-the-eyes white. It used to be fun to go to the group every day and see who commented on the new decor, now I may as well post from email. All creativity and individuality has been crushed. Yahoo was formerly unique in offering people the ability to create a place online that felt like an actual location. Going to the group was, for my members and me, like visiting the friendly neighborhood gathering place. We’d be greeted by warm colors, a beautiful picture, and a sense of having arrived in a special place we had created for ourselves. This group has been around for more than a decade, and the atmosphere we created has been destroyed. It feels cold, unwelcoming, and institutional now. The fact that most of the doors are locked (ie, the links don’t work) just makes it that much more like foreign territory.

to stand together against this NEO mess, insist it be rolled back or made voluntary, and to search for alternatives if they’d rather give up. I gained over 100 members in 3 days, where I hadn’t had that many since the upgrade of Groups that they tried in 2010, and over 400 messages in 7 days.

Over a quarter of a million users have left, with their groups deleted, and aren’t coming back. At least that many are poised to follow. No one is listening to us, despite the thousands of posts that continue to flood the Feedback forum on the top level telling them to stop forcing them to be part of this NEO experiment.

In general, I prefer “quick” and “clean” over “cool” . However, the fundamental problem with the NEO interface is the loss of control enjoyed by moderators and general users. For example. I despise the group activity list on the left hand side. It takes up space, it’s incomplete, the response is unpredictably slow and it’s unnecessary. If I want to go to another group, I can click on the ‘my groups’ button. In any modern browser I can have the group selection page on another tab, ready to go. However, if others differ, fine, let them have it, but MAKE THE OPTION CUSTOMISABLE.

The most irritating thing about the NEO display, minute by minute, is the loss of the ability to show a page of expanded messages in chronological order, with next and previous options, unthreaded. Again, not everybody wants that, but MAKE THE OPTION CUSTOMISABLE.

Thank goodness I found all of you & your comments which I agree 1000%! Yahoo tried to pull this crap over 2-years ago, their makeover team was as braindead & obnoxious then as it apparently is now with this latest nightmare, which I was late in discovering due to offline duties of life.

Brenda/NightOwl thank you, I will be joining your group if I can even access it & join!

Most of the menu bars/tabs don’t work on my YGs, only About page & Msgs, but I cannot access Mgmt, Members, etc.

The URLs are all different now, they ruined my group descriptions which are all crammed together w/o proper spacing, they removed my beloved homepage photos I worked so hard on & that are NOT banner-shaped, they deleted all my beautiful colors, I can’t find the usual things, they axed the Group Messages Tearly History Chart that used to be at bottom of homepage & I loved that thing!, & so true re the BLAND INSTITUTIONAL LOOK (read: Communism, baby, where all individuality is to be crushed & replaced w/groupthink, humans void of individuality), & so true re the WASTE OF SPACE in left column of listing all one’s groups there (hello, the dropdown at top was FINE as it was!), etc etc.

I about had a heart attack when U saw this horrendous change across all my groups tonight, several as old as 2001-2002!

You can tell Yahoo has totally given itself over to the New World Order (globalist tyranny) by the stock photos they slapped on our sites as banner photos: My groups are USA yet one now has a banner pic re Africa, another group has a banner of Persia-type bldgs (Muslim), another has United Nations/EU flags, another Christian health group has New Agers sitting meditating with hands/palms turned upward (Yoga). The point is, this is just another small way they get their kicks assaulting the American heritage in their quest to destroy all national cultures & sovereignties, & turn every country & everyone into a mindless globalized serf. It is NOT “multiculturism.” that’s a lie & a ruse, sweet words of evil intent.

Oh, & all my group titles are gone, only the secondary tagline description is on those banner pics!

A truly hideous mess they created. Yahoo, you have suicided yourself for good this time. I loved YGs from the day I got online (egroups back then) & sang your praises innumerable times over the years! I loved my groups but should have seen the handwriting on the wall from your prior obnoxious attempt to ruin what YGs is (WAS), an EMAIL discussion platform, NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA cesspool. Obviously you merely told us you would not change things but carried on behind the scenes to ruin the ONLY good thing left about Yahoo, ie, the now former YahooGroups!

Since my YGs were mostly newsletter-format-oriented, & after Yahoo’s last near-stunt to ruin UGs, I started setting up shop at free WordPress, thank goodness. It’s now time to make a full consolidation by moving all my YGs archives over. Been saving this name for a few years, hope they are still in biz, GROUP FETCH. They will grab & move all your YG archives anywhere you want, for a fee.